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Who'd Go To University Today? (spiked-online.com)
Are students being short-changed by their $60,000 degree courses? And does a university education in 2018 represent good value for money? A slew of recent government and think-tank reports aim to tackle these questions. And the answers they give are not encouraging. From a report: The Public Accounts Committee announced this month that the value of the UK's student-loan system is falling. Last year, the government sold a tranche of the student-loan book at a major loss. The portfolio had a face value of $4.4 billion, but was sold for just $2.1 billion: a return of 48p in the pound, according to the public-spending watchdog. Clearly, the current method of funding higher education represents a bad deal for the taxpayer.
But do universities offer good value for students? Not when you consider the fact less than half the money that students pay in tuition fees is actually spent on teaching, according to a report by the Higher Education Policy Institute. The rest of the money from tuition fees goes into other services and parts of the administration. These include admissions procedures, marketing, vice-chancellor pay and programmes to boost access for poorer students, as well as therapeutic services like mental-health provision and exam-stress counselling.
Universities today have far too much bureaucracy, fat-cat VC's salaries are far too high, and a great deal of what administrators spend money on is a hindrance to education. University bureaucracy is often at the forefront of coddling students, encouraging them to see exams and hard work as threats to their mental health. It is troubling to see that students are not only plunging themselves into debt at such a young age, but also that much of that debt does not go towards their actual education.
But do universities offer good value for students? Not when you consider the fact less than half the money that students pay in tuition fees is actually spent on teaching, according to a report by the Higher Education Policy Institute. The rest of the money from tuition fees goes into other services and parts of the administration. These include admissions procedures, marketing, vice-chancellor pay and programmes to boost access for poorer students, as well as therapeutic services like mental-health provision and exam-stress counselling.
Universities today have far too much bureaucracy, fat-cat VC's salaries are far too high, and a great deal of what administrators spend money on is a hindrance to education. University bureaucracy is often at the forefront of coddling students, encouraging them to see exams and hard work as threats to their mental health. It is troubling to see that students are not only plunging themselves into debt at such a young age, but also that much of that debt does not go towards their actual education.
I truly think we are starting to see the edge of an education bubble. For many years, high school pushed college so hard people got worthless degrees that did nothing to prepare them for the job market. This devalued the mostly none stem degree. Think about it. I can get a degree in communications and come out with 60k in debt and make 40k a year. Or go into a trade and make 80k with little to ne debt. Second, when politicians say make school more affordable they just mean make it easier to get loans.
To answer the question quickly: There are still a lot of countries where education, including at universities, is free or very inexpensive. People there will continue to visit universities in large numbers.
Not to mention, you get into the workforce and you have large corporations doing everything they can to keep wages down. Free internships, H-1Bs, etc etc.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Who cares if your universities have problems when you're getting free healthcare??? U.S. sucks! Go Europe!!
But in all seriousness - I think that if universities were required to clearly and cleaning break their "fees" into components as to what they fund, it would really open some eyes. A yearly invoice might look like this:
Tuition (funds professors and classroom activities: $XXX
Student Extras (funds clubs facilities that all students can use): $XXX
Privileged Student Extra (funds clubs and facilities that only SOME students can use): $XXX
Outreach (general recruiting and student support): $XXX
Specialty Outreach (recruiting and support for only SOME types of students): $XXX
Athletic Teams (anything funding the school's athletic teams - not all students can play): $XXX
Building & Grounds Maintenance: $XXX
Utilities and Related Operational Costs: $XXX
Administration (people not doing maintenance or teaching): $XXX
When people start to see their own dollar figures going to some of this shit, maybe they will care about it.
Then again, may not.
If the job or career path can't reasonably pay back, then unless you have extra cash, a different path should be taken. Trade schools can be gateways to decent jobs and cost a fraction, and even if you do take college courses, things can be done to make them cheaper: A community college has a lot of inexpensive, transferable, General education credits. In my engineering program, one of my classmates was simultaneously taking engineering courses at my university and driving to a nearby community college for the Calculus courses.
Living at college used to be closer to living in the military. Dorms were spartan, you didn't have a choice at meal time, you ate what was served. Now, no one would go there unless they had a choice of on-campus coffee shops. Students are demanding housing that graduates couldn't even afford in the past. They want every kind of service imaginable. If the school doesn't provide it, they go elsewhere. So, schools are competing to offer great service and living conditions. If they don't, they don't attract the best students. Schools aren't investing the same way in the actual quality of teaching. Only the most dedicated students actually make their decision based on that. All this drives up the cost, and for some reason students are willing to pay.
I went to University for the same reason as everyone else: the women. There is a reason it is called "the best time of your life".
Are students being short-changed by their $60,000 degree courses?
Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. I think a better question is whether we are doing a good job directing people into schooling options appropriate for both the needs of the individual and society. For some reason we tend to look down on trade schools and anything else besides a 4+ year degree despite the fact that many jobs really don't require such education. Not everyone needs a 4 year college degree but we funnel a lot of people into college who probably don't need to be there.
And does a university education in 2018 represent good value for money?
It certainly can. The lifetime earning increase from a college degree very often substantially outweighs the cost of tuition. Not to mention that there are quite a few jobs you simple cannot get without having earned a college degree. I'm an engineer (among other things) and good luck getting a job as an engineer without a college degree. It's possible but really, really hard at most companies.
But do universities offer good value for students? Not when you consider the fact less than half the money that students pay in tuition fees is actually spent on teaching. The rest of the money from tuition fees goes into other services and parts of the administration.
That's kind of a dumb argument. Educating a large student body inherently comes with a lot of overhead. Let me use an analogy closer to the heart of many people here. Only about 10-25% of the cost of developing a piece of software is the actual engineering and code writing. The overwhelming majority of the cost to the company is in sales and administration. This isn't a good or bad thing, it's just how the numbers fall out. When you have a student body of 50,000 students, you need a lot of administrative staff to manage that. There is a lot more to teaching students than just doing a few lectures. That's not to say all schools manage their money effectively but the notion that administration isn't going to be pretty substantial at a large university is absurd.
Not to mention, teaching is only part of what universities do and arguably not even really their main purpose. They also are in many cases research institutions which has little to nothing directly to do with educating students but still carries very real costs. Part of student tuition often goes to pay for part of this even though the students may see little to no direct benefit from it.
You missed at least half the story. Less than half of spending goes towards teaching. It is a huge pot of money without accountability and is getting "stolen" by administration. "Free" education just makes this problem worse.
Many degrees are not getting students jobs anywhere near what the degree costs. Again "Free" education doesn't solve this, it makes it worse.
Its almost as if you fixed these issues, the problem of if its "free" or not becomes moot. Price goes down by half, and you get something worthwhile. If you can get a STEM degree that pays $100k a year for $30k, are you going to throw a fit because you had to pay for it and it wasn't provided by the government?
Where the rugged individualists of the Slashdot meritocracy, much smarter than their normal peers, decry the value of a college education even as their jobs are outsourced to H1B coders with multiple advanced degrees and willing to work for less, and corporate management who won't touch you without that bachelor's?
Colleges and Universities really shouldn't be Job Prep institutions. They are academic institutions who's job is to educate people, for the most part for a job in academia, where their research findings are often published, sold, or given to the public. Or received grants to do such research.
However the problem became the mantra "If you want a good job then you need a college degree" So people got college degrees, and businesses also bought into this and made job requirements to require college degrees, even for jobs that really doesn't require them.
American Vocational training seems to be limited to mostly Blue Collar jobs, which are good paying and often rewarding jobs, but white collar work still requires a college degree, even though the work has little to do with what you have learned in college with the exception of some soft skills, such as time management, being able to stick to getting a degree, interacting and learning about other cultures. However there are a lot of jobs out there that don't need a degree. An computer programmer doesn't need a computer science degree, but it needs more than just knowing what the commands do. There are a lot of principals of computer science that needs to be taught, but not a 4 year degree, mixed with classes in liberal arts classes.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"Clearly, the current method of funding higher education represents a bad deal for the taxpayer. " Governments of all kinds receive a MASSIVE ROI on education. By having you know, an educated workforce the government expands its tax base probably an order of magnitude over what it would have otherwise, dramatically increasing its revenues. The quote represents nothing but a short sighted conservative hyperbole. It amounts to "OMG I CANT IMAGINE ANY BENEFIT OTHER THAN A DIRECT INSTANTATIOUS PROFIT, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT DELAYED GRATIFICATION IS"
The root cause of current higher-education problem is government backed student loans. Why is that? Well it's fairly simple. Student loans can not be discharged by bankruptcy. In addition companies that offer student loans have little to no risk - because student loans in the US are fully backed by the government.
As a result, there is no incentive to means-check people prior to giving them a loan. In point of fact, there is very little means-checking. In addition, because of the government backing of the loan there does not need to be a correlation between what a particular degree is likely to actually pay, and how much the education might cost.
For instance, an electrical engineer could go to a university on all student loans. As long as that person gets reasonable grades, they will have decent earning potential. Another student could go to the same university and get a degree in basket weaving. It will cost them about the same. But the earning potential afterwards is nil. They are unlikely to pay back the loan.
This has led to universities charging insane amounts of money for degrees that are near worthless. We can't and shouldn't protect people from getting worthless degrees. That's their problem. We SHOULD, however, remove the liability from the taxpayer for those worthless degrees. That decoupling would result in far more stringent means-testing. It would also mean that loan companies would no longer give students loans for worthless degrees.
A college degree would be worth more. Trade-schools would likely make a return. People would be naturally funneled toward degrees that are in demand. We would be better off all the way around. Keep in mind, this is very similar to what happened to the housing market. As long as loan companies could gives loans and hide the risk they will do so. In the housing bubble's case it was through the clumping together of mortgages to hide the risk. In this case it's the government hiding the risk.
any more than fancy dorms are the cause of rising tuition.
Per the article I linked above tuition is going up because we slashed federal and state subsidies. I'm so tired of this lie being repeated...
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You don't have to drive a Ferrari, and you don't have to go to Yale. You can choose a car and a school that's affordable.
I'm about to start my Master's degree at Georgia Tech, one of the best schools in the country for my field. It'll cost $10,000 - 20% tax credit = $8,000.
For my bachelor's I could have spent less for the same school I went to. I paid a total of $24,000 - $6,000 tax credit = $18,000.
A lot of schools have a cap on the tuition per semester so you can do 24 credits for the same price as 12. Many allow credit by examination. What I suggest to people now is to spend a 6-12 months studying before you officially enroll, then take the tests or submit the work so you get 9 credits in your first month of paying. Those kinds of strategies can bring the total cost for a bachelor's degree down to $9,000 after the tax credit.
I got my bachelor's at WGU, which is a state school. Halfway through school my income doubled partly because the final exams for some classes are industry certs like Cisco CCNA. So as a junior I had already earned several well-known certs as part of my classes.
Please, tell me where University still costs only $60,000...
I got a degree for $20k in the early y2k at the local state college. The cost is a bit more than double that now but worth it for a job that paid $55k starting out of college in software development, and has gone up from there. The degree also included a full year of internship that paid $15 an hour which helps a lot with costs. This doesn't include housing costs as I lived from home and commuted so YMMV.
Please, tell me where University still costs only $60,000...
I got a degree for $20k in the early y2k at the local state college.
Got it.
The first hit on google: "According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2017–2018 school year was... $9,970 for state residents at public colleges."
https://www.collegedata.com/cs...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Americans love to rant about how they think money is wasted in higher ed, but this article is from the UK. Not everything compares directly as their costs are a bit different.
As a full-time staffer at a major public research university in the US, I'd like to mention one cost that was not in the summary: building and grounds costs. Even if you don't want perfectly manicured lawns, you still need to maintain a level of safety on the grounds and make sure the buildings are collapsing on themselves. Many schools have faced year after year of reduced state and federal funding, and they have to pay these bills somehow. This isn't just an image thing either; a lot of grounds maintenance is about safety.
It is also worth noting that tuition helps pay for the costs of keeping the lights on, maintaining temperatures in rooms and labs, etc. Even as we go to smart(er) thermostats it is still not a trivial matter to provide efficient heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. Schools aren't allowed to bill these costs to grants.
Are executives overpaid at our schools? Almost without question. But the amount of the tuition revenue that goes to their pay is pretty small compared to other costs that the schools have to face.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
A dirty little secret: for the vast majority of students, admissions is a total guessing game. It is pretty clear who is the top of the top (and who is the bottom of the bottom), but for 95% of students, we really don't have any good pre-college measures that indicate whether someone will be successful in college or not.
High school GPA is the best measure we have, and it only accounts for 10-20% of the variance in college performance. If we really want to limit college enrollment, we'd be better just setting a minimum bar (e.g., high school GPA of 2.50), and then randomly selecting from everyone who meets that minimum bar.
So many others might best be described as pecuniary extraction. Unless one is planning on going the whole way to a doctorate, then replacing instructor, you're getting nothing of worth.
As well, the single minded obsession with getting a degree allowed some amazing tuition inflation.
The tuition inflation allowed adding multiple layers of middle management, and as the story notes, groups that had nothing to do with education.
So there is the price gouging.
Some other things started happening as well. Universities were a place where ideas and different opinions were allowed to flourish, and tolerance of different outlooks was encouraged. But they hit a real pothole in the road by tolerating people who promoted intolerance of a far left wing variety.
So people like Anne Coulter, and Bill Maher were uninvited from some places they were to speak at after the far left kooks demanded they be excluded.
People such as Bill Maher, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Larry the Cable Guy all stopped playing college campuses because of the political correctnes demands. As Maher put it (paraphrased) "When a lily White guy, a Black guy, a Jewish guy and a Redneck agree that colleges are a bad place, they are probably on to something".
Toxic environment.
Being a male on a college campus is a rather unpleasant experience. You have to pay for "classes" where you are told just how evil a rapist you are, and that your future depends on your strict obedience. What is more, those things that can get your future destroyed are rather ambiguous. To cap it off, there is no due process. If you and a female engage in anything while both drinking, she cannot give consent. But for some reason, you can. The results are a confusing mine field for male students.
So at this time, we are seeing something like a 67 percent female enrolment in college. The males have made their decision to avoid that toxic environment. As male attendance drops, the people remaining get angrier and angrier, and the way a man sits is now worthy of outrage and hatred. You mean I'm supposed to pay for that abuse? The interesting part is that as some of these career women hit their mid to late 30's they want to settle down, find a man, and start fertilization therapy. But they find that there are no men "worthy" of them. DDG "where have all the good men gone" to see the laments of modern professional women.
They want to settle down, but unfortunately, there are no men that measure up. In true far left feminist fashion, they are trying some of the same tactics that drove men away in the first place.
Reminds me of the old saying "The floggings shall continue until morale improves"
So back to the original part of my post, outside of a few majors, college is not remotely worth it. As well, it takes advantage of many women who after its over, find themselves in possession of worthless degrees consisting of giving your opinion, and that only inflate their egos, then deprives them of normal life relationships and activities.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
The picture is a bit different at private schools, which do not receive state funding but have nonetheless seen substantial tuition increases. At private nonprofit colleges, the spending categories described above — student services and faculty and administrative salaries — together explain most of the tuition increase over the past two decades.
The lifetime earning increase from a college degree very often substantially outweighs the cost of tuition
That used to be true but why would you think it would be true any longer?
In fact I would argue such a thought is DANGEROUSLY wrong.
Why? Example. Say someone took a year to live near a college, take some courses in audit, and take a WHOLE bunch of online courses in any field, which you could lean on local student study groups to understand.
After that year you easily will know enough to get an entry level job in a field you have been studying. Now instead of paying tuition, you are working while studying further,
Take that four years out. Instead of debt you have three years worth of earnings (I'm assuming you only studied that first year). Such a person may well be able to have 20-40k of savings they can invest when they are around 20, and three years of solid work history to pursue more advanced work opportunities.
So how can you possibly think the person with $200-$500k of debt can ever catch up?
The thing that totally tears down the "lifetime earnings" argument is that workplaces no longer seriously consider degrees. Even Google which famously used to require graduate degrees had to chuck that requirement out the window in order to hasten the build of the Don't-Be-Evile Empire.
The other side benefit of an early work approach is that you can find out what work in your chosen field is REALLY like. There are a huge number of students that spend four years to get a degree and find that they don't want to do what they have spent four years prepping for. Madness.
On a side side note, another benefit of not being an official student of a college you are near is that you can pick any one to stay near without having to be accepted, and get the same caliber of student interaction.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
except for the rich kid's dorms. I just put my kid through the dorms (moved her to an apartment after yr 1 because it was cheaper and nicer). Yes, there are "nice" dorms. They're crazy expensive and only for the rich kids. They're a profit center for the schools, and my kid got nowhere near them.
I've already put this link in the thread but it deserves repeating. Once again, Fancy dorms are _not_ the problem. Cutting state and federal funding so we could cut taxes on the rich is. And the rich don't care because you're expendable. They don't need you or your kids to be educated. They've got H1-Bs for that.
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I've averaged 20 credits a quarter for six quarters, finished my community college in 1 year, and am on track to finish a double major in CS and Math by the end of my third year. What allowed me to do that was already having a strong foundation in programming from years of experience, and being good at Math. I also went into it focused, and knowing what I want to do. No credits wasted on switching majors, or exploratory classes.
Similar to the GP's suggestion I spent about a month or so refreshing on mathematics and taught myself trigonometry so that I tested straight into Calculus. This has meant that every credit I have taken has gone towards my degree, no need to build up taking low level college math credits that don't count for anything but electives.
My toughest quarter was 23 credits, with 3 math courses, physics, and assembly programming and maintained a 3.97 GPA. Nothing particularly savant, and have never cheated, but I have made sacrifices and prioritized my education. Some classmates go out and get drunk on the weekends, showing up to class with hangovers, and I spend my time studying my subjects in more depth, or exploring other subjects of interest.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]